A lifeline for teenage families

Friday

Oct 29, 2010 at 12:01 AM

STOCKTON - Bright and early before the opening bell each morning, the little girl with bushy hair arrives for her day at Franklin High School, which might seem odd, because she won't celebrate her second birthday until March.

Roger Phillips

STOCKTON - Bright and early before the opening bell each morning, the little girl with bushy hair arrives for her day at Franklin High School, which might seem odd, because she won't celebrate her second birthday until March.

But for Nidhyana Avina and seven other toddlers and infants, going to high school every day is perfectly natural. The children's parents, after all, are children themselves - Franklin High School students.

Nidhyana's mother, 17-year-old Angelica Rodriguez, is a senior who expects to graduate from high school in 2011. Angelica's goal is to attend a four-year college and to become a teacher. But without the preschool provided by Stockton Unified, her hopes probably would have been dashed.

"I wouldn't be able to go to school if I didn't have help watching her," Rodriguez said last week during a lunch break she spent in the preschool with Nidhyana and the toddler's father, 17-year-old Franklin senior Victor Avina.

"I wouldn't have been able to come to school."

Eight babies of Franklin students are currently enrolled in the program, which is staffed by one teacher and three assistants. Two more babies are expected this month and two more in November, at which point the program will be full.

There are additional programs at Edison High and at the Stockton School for Adults, but they fill only a fraction of the need in Stockton Unified. Rebecca Lopez, a social worker for Stockton Unified, said students in the district of 38,000 were parents to about 125 children last year.

As with numerous social services in California, the state's ongoing financial turmoil is threatening programs such as the one at Franklin. The Franklin program nearly ended this year, which would have been painfully bad timing considering it was preparing to move out of its longtime portable classroom and into a brand new facility.

The sparkling new building across the street from the high school was built with Measure Q bond funds approved by voters in 2008. But earlier this year, as the school board struggled to slash Stockton Unified's budget because of state funding cuts, the money for the Franklin program was diverted to other uses.

Only the successful efforts of early childhood education administrator Debra Keller and grant writer Bonnie Mansfield to secure alternate funding from First 5 San Joaquin allowed the new building to open. Keller said the issue of funding is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

"It'll be a year-to-year situation where we will be looking for additional funding every year," Keller said.

Keller and Lopez said they view programs that help teen parents with their children as an investment in two generations.

For the teen parents, the programs help them stay in school. Keller said an average of 76 percent of teen parents who receive services from the California School-Age Families Education programs provided by First 5 go on to graduate. In addition to helping the teens stay in school, they also help the teens become better parents to their children.

"Over here we teach them parenting skills," Lopez said. "The teachers role model for them. ... They're learning about books, they're learning to play, they're learning how to interact with each other, they're learning colors, shapes. They learn a lot here."

If the teens were to drop out, they would be home all day with their babies. Asked what she would be doing without the Franklin preschool, Angelica said, "Probably nothing."

Keller said, "If these students drop out, they are then more at risk for domestic violence, child abuse, homelessness and other issues."

Keller, 45, said an experience nearly 20 years ago helped her understand the challenges teen parents face. She was 26, she said, but looked 16. She was also eight months pregnant, and one day a stranger approached her and her husband at a restaurant and asked her an insulting question about how it felt "to be a pregnant teen."

At the Franklin preschool and at other such programs in Stockton Unified and other districts, the goal is to assist the teens and create a nonjudgmental environment.

"You have to admire the teens for getting up every morning and for packing up their diaper bags and getting everything ready for their children and placing their babies in the stroller and strolling them to school and then dropping them off at the center, and then attending school all day," Keller said. "And then coming back and picking up their babies.

"You really have to admire that it is a feat. ... To see these teens be very successful at it is a feat in itself. We're very proud of them."